Jasrin Dhatt

“…we are the bethinged,” —Heidegger

In our consumer society, our possessions have become extensions of the self. Our ‘stuff’ is used to signal who we want to be and where we want to belong. And long after we are gone, it becomes our enduring legacy; we become a memory of a person that belonged to a thing. In our consumer society, whatever maximizes individual happiness is considered the best action. Our rampant consumerism has led to pollution, exhausted resources, inequity, spiritual withdrawal and above all violence in its many forms.

I explore these themes within both my painting and print work. In order to bring focus to the parallels between the interior and exterior, the self and the consumer ‘thing/object’, my work often inverts traditional subject hierarchies seen within western art traditions. The ‘thing/object’ is given the same attention and centrality as the human subject. My process typically involves carefully staged photographs of domestic scenes, most recently of rooms filled with moving and storage boxes or bags of ‘stuff’. The scenes are digitized by a camera, distorted by a printer and further manipulated through the painting or print process, reflecting neither the original observed subject nor the reference photograph; A carefully and deliberately made disconnected thing,

“a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process” (Stiegler).